A Portrait of the Artist as a
Housewife
(Excerpt)
September 2005
Earlier this morning I yelled at JH and L because
they were still in their halloween costumes and barefoot ten minutes after I
told them it was time to get dressed and find their shoes. I only left them to their own devices
for a few minutes so I could find my own shoes and clip back my hair. I was irritated.
Then to school. Then home with the groceries. The messy kitchen.
The piles of old school drawings, homework, etc., on the dining room
floor. I brought my coffee and
toast downstairs to my office and turned on music ("Martha -
writing") and looked through a fat book of black and white photographs of
jazz musicians in the early 1920s.
I couldn't find a way to start working on my book but I could find a way
into this.
~
I'm working on a book, a historical mystery. I started writing it a couple of months
ago (July?). Before that I did a
few months' worth of research for it.
Now I'm trying to find a schedule for myself so I can write and do the
hours and hours and hours of more research I fear this book will require.
I was thinking I could do some research while I wait
around at my children's after-school activities. I certainly have time there. Yesterday: two hours at gymnastics class
("ginnastics" L calls it) up in the bleachers. One hour was spent chatting with two
mothers from L's old preschool, one of whom, LC, is someone I like to talk to
about books. But instead of books
the three of us spoke about how much laundry we do and laundry chute stories
and the cost of cleaners and did our mothers complain as much as we do? LC always wears such interesting
earrings. She once recommended a
book to me and I bought it but haven't yet read it. I'm going to read it for next week so we can talk about that
instead of laundry.
Don't think I wasn't perfectly happy to talk about
laundry though.
Today I walked up the 163 steps by my house as an
additional loop, making my uphill walk home from school 20 minutes instead of
10, saving me a good 60 minute gym excursion. (Or not, seeing as I'm not going to the gym so much lately
anyway.) More time to write, I thought.
I am having such a hard time finding my way in to the first Eve
section. A bad sign? Should I scrap that idea? Or just keep at it? Fight through? Either it will happen or
it won't, but it might happen so late that I've given up, thinking it won't.
~
I think I found a way in.
We were in Olympia, Washington, for my friend
Helen's wedding. Afterwards we
went to a farmer's market and a banjo band was playing "Just Inside the
Gate." I thought of that for a title of the chapter, then I thought of
other chapter titles. They could
be like guideposts to the action -- but is this too gimmicky?
Each morning I wake up, I make coffee, then I make
lunch and breakfast for the kids, make sure they start getting dressed in good
time, tell JH to brush his teeth, I brush L's teeth, L shows me her clothes for
the day, hopefully I remember to tell them to go to the bathroom one last time,
I brush their hair, take my key and get us all out the door (sunglasses?
sunscreen? warm enough jackets?), walk to school, kiss JH good-bye outside the
big yard, take L to the kindergarten yard, go inside the classroom with her,
walk with her to her cubby, tell her what the question of the day is, wait
while she writes her name in the "no" or "yes" column, say
good-bye several times before she will let me go (although she won't hug or
kiss me), remind her we are going to have "a nice good-bye" and
stroke her little head while she looks around taking everything in, the little
girls saying "Hi L! Hi
L!" and the teacher moving this way and that and anything new on the
walls. Then out the door and on my
20-minute walk up hills and steps, my mind gradually clearing of administrative
household memos-to-myself.
There are a lot of these kinds of memos.
October
JH talks to me about superheroes on the way to
school each morning; there's a character he likes whose name, he tells me,
"sounds something like Influenza."
Yesterday and today I cheated: I worked on the
weekend. One hour, and I can get a
lot down. Especially now because
I'm basically transcribing, culling what's good from my written pages, typing
that into the computer. For this
book I started out writing everything on yellow legal pads, handwritten, then
after I get a certain amount done (a section, say) I type it into the computer
and edit as I go. This is
different from my first book, which I typed straight into the computer. But this manuscript, this historical
mystery as they say, is not like than anything I've written before.
I have friends who always know what draft they're
on and sometimes people ask me how many drafts I write of each book. I have no idea. Mostly I just keep working the pages
and try not to get too caught up in endlessly editing the beginning.
The novel is about a white woman and a black woman
in the early 1920s. The white
woman, Klarissa, is trying to discover why her brother was killed. She infiltrates a jazz band as a
pianist but in order to do so she has to dress like a man. The black woman, Eve, is a composer and
pianist for a black band that plays in a nearby club.
My plan is that they meet up and help each other,
but I'm not sure how.
I write with a slightly panicked sense of
freedom. All this free time now
that the kids are both in school, but I know, I know, that anything could
happen -- an injury, an illness, sudden unemployment -- which would force me to
put my work aside. It's happened
so many times, not just to me. You
get some open time, you have to use it even if it's the weekend. I can't afford to sit and wait for a
muse, I can only hope she comes around while I'm working.
~
I was sick on Tuesday so I sat on my bed all morning
reading Sidney Bechet's autobiography.
The light was clear and beautiful coming in through my bedroom window
and the ocean was a rich color of blue I couldn't describe. Such a safe life, there on my bed in my
house. Some think safety is
antithetical to good writing. And
yet I couldn't write if I didn't feel safe. In some ways my life is mostly internal.
Today there is so much laundry piled up that I
decided that that is what I must do, I must write around doing the
laundry. I can hear the dryer
spinning now. In my situation I can't
help think, as others surely have, of those Victorian writers who produced so
much, the lucky gentlemen without jobs and with wives and servants who did the
laundry, did the cooking, cleaned the kitchen, so they were free to observe the
color of the ocean and have a rich internal life. They had children and sisters and house problems, and yet
these things didn't seem to come into their writing. When writing they could divorce themselves from all that.
Sidney Bechet talks a lot about the feeling of the
music he's playing, that the best musicians (or "musicianers," as he
calls them) play so well because they have this feeling, the feeling of their
lives and everything that's happened to them -- bad and good. They can reach in and get that into
their music.
An obvious parallel for writers. I remember a passage from Charlotte
Bronte's Jane Eyre that Virginia Woolf once pointed out, where Jane Eyre breaks
character and laments about the inequities in her life, passionately, with true
feeling, and VW claims here we see the real Bronte reaching out and it is
striking and honest but it doesn't belong, it doesn't fit the rest of the
book. And yet. It is one of the truest passages.
How to reach down and look at your life and bring
what's there into your work. How
to bring this: you are half listening to the dryer waiting for it to stop, you
still have the feeling of the school and its structures where you've dropped
off your children, you can hear a power tool going somewhere outside your
office window, there's the sense of your unmade bed upstairs and wondering if
you'll make time to go to the gym, the feeling of Sidney Bechet and the great
desire to bring what you've read there into your work, the feel of your fingers
against the keyboard keys, a sudden silence because the dryer has buzzed it's
terminus and the power tool has stopped and the car with the loud bass going
has now gone on up the street and away.
~
I have read six books on the culture of the 1920s;
eight books about the culture, people, or history of jazz; a book about the
Cleveland mafia; four memoirs or autobiographies;
and twenty or thirty newspaper and magazine articles dated between 1920 and 1923.
Recently I was wondering why it is I don't feel like
reading anymore in the evenings.
December
My mother-in-law is visiting for the holidays. When I told her, this morning, that I
was going to go down to my office and work for a half hour, she seemed
surprised and possibly hurt. Two
nights ago two women came over; they are both writers and we get together once
a month to talk about writing.
They are both mothers. They
are both, at the moment, not writing.
When they asked me how I was getting along I said I was getting along
all right. One said, But you're
going to take a break for the holidays, right?
I said, surprised, of course.
Surprised because it hadn't occurred to me to take a
break for the holidays. Well maybe
Christmas. But how many days make
up the holidays? I wasn't going to
stop writing altogether for a week, or however many days "the
holidays" cover.
And so I lied.
Of course I'll take a break.
It was instinctive, a protective gesture.
I did some editing this morning, input some changes
I had made before. I made some new
changes. My children kept coming
down and talking to me. I worked
for a little less than an hour, now I plan to spend the rest of the day with my
family.
Just a minute ago JH told me Rich is taking a nap
(annoying, because I told him he should visit with his mother -- usually he's
at work when she's here and I'm the one visiting). My daughter is trying to climb on my lap right now. I should go upstairs, I should visit
with my mother-in-law who has been alone all afternoon. I'm not even working on
my novel, I'm just trying to get some thoughts down. It feels very self-indulgent. Probably it is.
January
This morning I spent over an hour cleaning my house
before the cleaners came to clean my house. Then I walked with a neighbor for exercise. As the neighbor and I were talking it
occurred to me that the conversation we were having was the same conversation
that we had the last time we walked together (three months ago). Just as we had the last time and the
time before, we agreed there was no easy way to raise a child in the city. Every other environment however, we
agreed again, also had its drawbacks.
Back home I worked on the novel, pulling all the
references to St. Lawrence, the town that I made up to accommodate novelistic
needs. After consulting with a curator in Chicago, I realized there was no way
African-American musicians would have been able to live alongside whites in
1921 in the fictional town of my creation.
Now the novel is set nowhere. Nowhere, but possibly Chicago. Then, sometime today, I thought: but
why not Cleveland? Cleveland as
the novel's setting is something I'd already considered and rejected. St. Lawrence -- the place I made up --
worked for some things but didn't work with the facts of segregation of the
time. (I've come to see
segregation not just as humiliation but as a hard, immovable wall.) I thought: why not Cleveland? I know it, and there's no specter of Al
Capone to compete with my plot.
I grew up in Cleveland. I know Cleveland. Well, and that's partly the trouble.
~
I carry in my black bag the book I'm currently
reading about jazz and a bunch of 4 x 6 notecards, a pen, yellow post-its, and
a yellow legal pad. Also a
coloring book, a ziploc bag of crayons, a juice box, two tangerines, a Mrs.
Piggle Wiggle book, plastic hairclips, a pair of boys' nylon shorts, a doll
dress, band-aids, my calendar, a colored and cut-out paper fish on a string,
and my wallet.
Last week I asked the curator of the University of
Chicago jazz archive one too many questions and exasperated her. Also I didn't sufficiently inform her
of my own reading and thus (I think) led her to believe I was relying solely on
her for my research. She sent me
an email saying "I believe we've come to the end of my usefulness to
you" -- too bad because I had so many more questions!
Today I emailed the curator of the jazz archive at
Tulane and I was, this time, more careful: I had "one quick
question," and "if you have time" can you tell me "where I
might find" a list of popular songs that might have been played by a small
band "(5-8 instruments)" in 1922? A few hours later I was rewarded with a list! Also a good source for a
discography. Most most helpful.
Now I'm sitting in the bleachers watching my
children's gymnastics class. I'm
thinking of eating potato chips from the vending machine instead of the
tangerine in my bag -- a little snack while I take notes from a book about
Chicago Jazz (1904-1920).
I still haven't decided where exactly I will place
my novel. Chicago, Cleveland, or
nowhere.
~
This is what it's sometimes like:
I got the kids to school and planned to walk the
tiled steps then go home and write, getting a good three hours of work in. But I had forgotten L's red book bag --
her homework -- which is due every Thursday. So I didn't walk the stairs, instead I went right home and
got the book bag and I also got a tee shirt for myself thinking maybe I'd go to
the gym after. I drove to their
school. I dropped off the bookbag. Okay, it's only a little after nine
o'clock, I still have lots of time to write. I hadn't yet decided if I'd go to the gym or not, but I had
the shirt if I did decide to go.
Then I heard music from the auditorium and
remembered there was an AIM's concert (an organization that sends different
musical groups to public schools) so I dropped in -- it was a jazz group this
time. Sax, piano, trumpet, drums,
and something else. Some
latin-caribbean sounds. I remembered
again how amazing live music is, you should never pass up the chance to listen
to live music. I sat and listened
to a few songs. Sitting there I
decided I was going to try to work out going to a class at a nearby state
college for more jazz research -- I'd looked up classes for the spring semester
that I might sit it on, learn something from. One of which was jazz band.
But I needed a babysitter to do that. I needed to find a babysitter.
I went home, looked at craigslist, emailed someone,
called someone else. The someone
else called me back right away and we arranged for her to come in about an hour
and a half so we could meet.
I sat down to write.
An hour later I got up and tidied. She was late. Thirty minutes after the hour and a half had passed she
called to say she'd be later. I
thought: I could have been writing all this time. I sat down and wrote another sentence, and then she showed
up.
After she left I looked at the clock. I was hungry. I ate lunch. I
looked at the clock again. It was
too late to go to the gym, or to do any more writing. I needed to go to the market. I went to the market.
Then I picked the kids up from school.
However, in that hour and a half when I was writing
I finally got to the character I'd been trying and failing to get to for the
past week. Even though everything
was stunningly off schedule, it was a good day. I got somewhere.
It was a good day.
~
JH is practicing the piano as I type. We're in the dining room. He's asking, What's your favorite song
of all time? He doesn't have
school today and is allowed to play his computer game after he practices the
piano. The kitchen timer is
running and he keeps getting up to check how many more minutes he has left.
L is visiting her old preschool with a friend. So as soon as JH finishes practicing I
can start to work.
I keep looking to see how much time he has left.
Why don't you run through that piece again? I
ask. He's kind of fooling around,
now he says, ah it's at forty-seven seconds.
I say, do those chords Susan wanted you to practice,
and he says, Those chords?
It's a piece.
Now the timer has beeped.
He's in the middle of the piece.
He quickly finishes up the piece (a series of
chords, to me) and runs downstairs to start his game.
I've decided to set the book in Chicago. It's really
the obvious place and frankly there are not too many places where a white woman
and a black woman could meet in public at that time and have a friendship that
isn't predicated on a servant/employer relationship.
For the past week I've been working in the dining
room instead of my office though I'm not sure why. I like the light from the window, maybe that's it. My office has light, but it's
messy. My dressing room is cozy,
tiny, but no natural light unless I keep the bathroom door open.
There's a man who works on his motorcycle every
morning for about forty-five minutes.
At last he takes it out for a spin, only to come back in about two
minutes for more tinkering.
Now I'm working in my bedroom where I can't hear the
motorcycle so much.
It seems like I keep doing little things to break up
the routine; I'm normally a very habitual person and usually this works for me
but the last book was written by some kind of machine (me), total habit, and it
didn't work out -- is that what I'm afraid of? That this book won't work out if I work the same way? So I move around, office, dressing
room, dining room, office. I go to
the library. I sit at a cafe. After I sit down I don't try to write
right away, maybe I'll look at pictures a while or read someone else's
book. Read through my notes. Write a sentence. Write a scene over, write it over a
couple of times.
Following my instinct.
Possibly that's code for procrastinate.
~
Yesterday I was driving my mini-van and I thought,
how can I be a writer? I drive a
mini-van.
How can you be a writer if you don't go to
bullfights and don't start drinking at eleven in the morning? If you constantly find yourself
trying to explain statements like "on the face of it" to your five
year old? If you talk about cars
and computer game characters with your nine year old? Wiping the kitchen counter constantly, wiping the table,
loading then unloading then loading then running the dishwasher?
This is not a portrait of an artist, is it? No one would think so. No one.
Unless you're writing about explaining obvious
statements while you wipe the counter and load the dishwasher -- which I'm
not. I'm not writing about
mothers, children, nothing like that, and maybe I should. Sometimes I feel like I'm somebody's
lowly administrative assistant with dreams of being a V.P., only you need an
M.B.A. to be a V.P. and I don't have an M.B.A. It's obvious that I won't get there, but I still work as if
I can get there.
For another thing, look at the way I dress. Right now I'm wearing running shoes and
tennis socks and a sports shirt I bought from an expensive catalog and sweatpants
I bought at Ross (I love these sweatpants). I might change into jeans later, and a tee shirt and
hoodie. I have no tattoos. I don't smoke anymore. No drugs, not even alcohol. I'm working on my dining room table,
which was expensive, and is now covered with a stained yellow tablecloth and
cluttered with children's books, a children's atlas, a bear puzzle, Janson's
History of Art, my new cell phone still in its box, my notecards, my yellow
pad, my coffee, a c.d. (The Best of Sidney Bechet), pens, a vase of dried
something or other, an etch-a-sketch.
My car, my clothes, my environment. How can I possibly be creative? It's perfectly obvious I've done it all
wrong. It's like the actress who
is not pretty enough for the lead but who is also not NOT pretty enough for the
lead's best friend, trying to make it either as the lead or her best friend --
but no one will hire her for either.
And yet I keep working as if someone will hire
me. As if the page matters more
than my outward appearance of my life.
Which of course is probably not true.
I should never stop to think about it.
February
Right around this point of every book I lose sight
of what I'm doing. Now, for
instance, I'm writing my character dressed as a man and she's with a lot of men
and I'm paying attention to whether I'm bringing out her alienation enough,
drawing enough attention to the gestures she tries out to make her look more
like a male, also trying to get the cadence of male speech right while I put in
enough period details. Are the
details right?
I forget the underlying structure. I'm caught up in the minutiae of the
scenes. Everything seems to stall,
because I've dropped into the wrong gear.
Then I stop.
Then I think, how is this supposed to go again?
The thing I do when all this starts happening is
this: I start searching the internet for editors, trying to find a good
fit. Now, I am probably a year or
more from finding an editor, but this is what it seems important, always, at
this point, to do. Not to mention
that I have an agent who will do this for me -- find an editor.
Sometimes I read over other, older things I've
written and decide whether they are good or bad. This seems important, somehow -- if I think an old story is
good then my current book is good, if I think an old story is bad then I'm in
trouble.
The editors I find are all very high-powered. The cream of the crop. I remind myself that everyone would
like these editors to be their editors.
The only thing that gets me out of all this is to
read other people's wonderful books.
This inspires me. I'm going
to do it now.
Or maybe I'll keep working on the draft letter to
the high-powered editor I am currently planning to woo. A letter which I'll never send, because
I have an agent who will do this for me.
~
Do you know what I'm doing instead of working on my
book? I am editing this
piece. I am reading over this
piece and changing a word here or there, sometimes whole paragraphs.
This piece is not supposed to have a life of its
own.
I have a vision for the labor scene -- the two
sisters. I'm back to the women and
I'm excited again to write, I think I can put it in gear. And yet, here I am, tinkering with
something that is not supposed to have a life of its own.
~
Finally I've started writing the labor scene.
I'm trying to find a realistic labor scene to read
-- I've read realistic accounts of nursing, baby-tending, the tedium of caring
for two year olds, early morning feedings, lots of early morning feedings, but
labor? The only one I remember is
by Jane Smiley, and the woman goes through labor so fast she practically has
the baby at Wal-Mart. Which
happens, just not a lot.
The one I'm writing is a fast labor -- in a way --
at least it doesn't go on for days. First you can talk through the contractions,
then after a while you can't. My
"fast" birth -- L -- took five hours. I'm thinking this won't be quite so fast, maybe it will be
six or seven hours. There's
something that I want to capture:
the comraderie of women during a birth.
Going through the paces together.
Recording the down time, too, the time between contractions.
~
Another holiday. The kids are home from school. I'm back in the dining room. Most of the clutter that was on the dining room table the
last time I wrote about it is still on the dining room table. What do I do, what good am I? I'm so tired of household organization,
of house beautification projects, I just want to read and write.
When we bought our house the same family had lived
in it for fifty years, and they had done nothing to it since about 1972. So okay, the kitchen gets a face lift
-- paint job, new counters, new drawers, etc. Then we did a bunch of work on the downstairs, involving new
floors and a new staircase, the requisite paint job, outfitting one of the
downstairs room with a new couch and t.v. and a mini kitchen. Oy. It's great, but, oy.
Now I'm done. I feel
done. I can hardly get myself to
organize the dining room. We eat,
of course, in the kitchen. How
could we eat in here?
L is listening to 101 Dalmations on tape while I do
a little work. Then I told her I'd
do an art project with her. JH is
following Rich around, hoping they will play a little of their computer game
together. It is a beautiful,
sunny, freezing cold day.
All I have to do is look over my work. That's what I set out for myself
today. Just read over the last few
pages I've written, see how they seem to me.
Amazing how, even though I've written so many pages
of this book, and I've written so many pages in my life, it is still hard to
get going. Especially if my
routine is at all different (i.e., no school today).
March
I've been writing furiously on notepads in my
office. Books spread out in front
of me -- pictures of red brick or stone houses built in Chicago at the turn of
the century. The photograph of the
woman, 1922, who looks so androgynous: my model for Klarissa. Pages printed out from the internet on
the history of neonatal feeding.
When was baby formula introduced?
When was the rubber nipple invented? Etcetera.
Today is my Wednesday, which means a neighbor walks
my children to school. I try to
keep Wednesday open so I can get a lot done, but today I have a dentist
appointment. I have terrible teeth
and going to the dentist is all about doing the right thing when you want to do
just the opposite. I began to look
over my work and got caught up in the first section, the first 50 pages, and
now I don't have time to shower or do anything else before I'm due to be
tortured by a very nice man using steel-colored instruments.
Also I have to find some snow boots for my kids
because on Friday we're going to the snow. And do some other stuff, which I forget but have written
down somewhere.
The scene I had planned to write this week has not even
been started. I was going to start
it Monday, but it seemed important to make some changes to the last scene
before moving on. That was good,
I'm glad I did that, although as I think of it I should probably write it all
over again to really get the language the way I want it (it's almost there) but
then what happens to moving on?
Can't work Friday, we're driving to Tahoe. So I'll have tomorrow only, but I'm volunteering in the
afternoon at my kids' school's book fair.
This week is par for the course. An example of a portrait of a writer as
a housewife. How that all works.
~